I have always wanted a nice Republic denarius.... I find them very pleasing to the eye, but want to learn about the coins before I buy. Can anyone recommend a good book or online resource which they have used/own please?
Ummm, I am a big fan of my hero's books ... David Sear => Roman Coins And Their Values (Volume-I) The Republic and The Twelve Caesars (280 BC - AD 96) ... ummm, but it is merely a book of examples and their relative values (but I love flipping-through and finding my target-coin before I pull the trigger) ... it keeps me honest Good luck ... I also love collecting AR RR's (other than the chariot-examples, the Ar RR's often have very cool subject-matter)
Some good online resources are: http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/ - Andrew McCabe's website. Probably the best free resource for Roman Republican coins out there NAC 61 - the RBW collection up to 90 BC. Lots of nice examples and commentary http://www.acsearch.info/search.html?term=&company=83&auction=1307 NAC 63 - the rest of the RBW Collection http://www.acsearch.info/search.html?term=&company=83&auction=1445 Check out the links in my signature as well. I recently moved my website about Roman Republican coins & my collection to its own dedicated hosting(it previously shared a domain & hosting with a personal website that I mostly just use for programming experiments). Right now there's not a lot there but I plan to start adding historical notes and such to the coins tonight and I plan to regularly write blog posts with book and paper reviews and such as well. As far as books: Crawford's "Roman Republican Coinage" is the best single reference book. Unfortunately it's expensive and unless you can get it via school or the local library, don't worry about buying it for your first coin. A cheaper alternative for denarii is "Roman Silver Coins Volume I". It's a nice secondary reference that I still use occasionally even though I have Crawford. BMC Roman Republic by Greuber is OK but much of the information is outdated, especially dating and such. That said, it is free online and in the public domain, which is nice. I'll try to list more later once I'm not on mobile but that should get you started.
While any serious collector will be buying books, too, Republican coins are particularly well represented online. If you learn to use their search tools, you can see a lot of things hard to duplicate on paper. http://numismatics.org/crro/results 2295 coins of which 895 are denarii http://davy.potdevin.free.fr/Site/crawford1.html This may be a bit easier to use? https://www.britishmuseum.org/resea...catalogues/rrc/how_to_use_this_catalogue.aspx This one is not the easiest to use but it is humongous!
Thanks everyone. I have seen some lovely RR AR's already which I would very much like to own. Mike Vosper has a lovely coin on vcoins and ebay for £140, but I need to wait and watch to see how much these go for ...... I'll check out the sites mentioned and see where I want the focus of my RR's to be. From what I have read to date it is very obvious that I will never be able to collect one of each moneyer!!!!
I agree with the notes above. I summarized my thoughts on RR books here: http://rrdenarius.blogspot.com/2015/06/references-for-roman-republican-coins.html An inexpensive book that I still use when I have a coin in hand and no information on the coin is - Coins of the Roman Republic in the National Museum of Warsaw, Janina Wiercinska, 1996. I used this book a lot when I started collecting. It lists many of the common RR coins and has good pictures. It was helpful before pictures became more available on the internet.
